The economic sensibilities of “A Christmas Carol”

IN SEPTEMBER 1843, as The Economist’s first edition went to press in London, a famous but debt-ridden writer was also commencing a new project. The short book, named “A Christmas Carol”, was partly an attempt to stave off the financial troubles of its author, Charles Dickens. In that respect, among others, it was a success. “A Christmas Carol” was published on December 17th, and sold out its initial run of 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve. The story was a foundational text for the distinctly Victorian version of Christmas which remains familiar today, with roast bird, festive cheer and homiletic tone.

Both the novella and this newspaper grew out of a period of intense political and economic turbulence. Rampant industrialisation was transforming Britain’s landscape; increasingly globalised trade had created new pressures, pitting established interests against a restive and maltreated working class. While The Economist was clear in its aim to champion free trade and classical liberalism, the ideological bent of “A Christmas Carol” was more equivocal. Many of the Victorian readers who drove the book’s initial popularity were drawn by its amenability to Biblical allegory, more than any perceived political message. By the Edwardian era, it was largely read as a whimsical children’s story. It was only in the 20th century that “A Christmas Carol” was taken up by literary critics who attempted to parse its political subtext. Its economic ideas are valuable, too.

More than any other Victorian novelist, Dickens was fascinated by financial systems and how they related to the inner lives of his characters. “A Christmas Carol” is no exception. Ebenezer Scrooge, the infamously miserly protagonist, embodies an especially nasty version of the scarcity economics of Thomas Malthus. Upon hearing that some people would rather die than face the unspeakable conditions of a workhouse, Scrooge retorts that they “had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”. The story of Scrooge’s subsequent nocturnal encounters with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, and his Yuletide change of heart, is as much a financial fable as it is a moral one.

The most obvious approach is to read the book as a straightforward critique of the inequities of Victorian capitalism, particularly given that Karl Marx cited Dickens as an influence on his revolutionary thinking. Indeed, after visiting schools and coal mines filled with starving and illiterate children, Dickens had initially planned to write a polemical pamphlet, but changed his mind after deciding that a popular Christmas tale could be a “Sledge hammer” that would “come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force” of an essay. Accordingly, there are bleak depictions of the threadbare household of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s overworked and underpaid clerk, who suffers miserably at the hands of his parsimonious paymaster. Scrooge’s journey with the Ghost of Christmas Present reaches a grim climax with the appearance of a pair of starving children, “meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish”, named Ignorance and Want. As “A Christmas Carol” was published, Friedrich Engels was in Manchester writing “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which recorded that plight in equally vivid detail.

Yet if Dickens and Engels identified similar problems, they had very different ideas as to the solution. The Cratchit family do not rise up in violent revolution: their woes are alleviated by a sudden spasm of charity on Scrooge’s personal behalf. One contemporary reviewer complained of the book’s celebration of “eating and drinking at the cost of munificent patrons of the poor”, while the “processes whereby poor men are enabled to earn good wages, wherewith to buy turkeys for themselves, do not enter into the account”.

Contrary to this assessment, the book does suggest more lasting improvements to socioeconomic troubles. It is just that, far from being anti-capitalist, they involve a confident, cheerful sort of consumerism. One of the most richly described scenes is the Christmas market, which overflows with abundance: Spanish onions, bunches of Mediterranean grapes, and oranges and lemons from the equator. As some critics have noticed, all these exotic products are the fruits of international free trade. And Scrooge’s extravagant expenditure is both philanthropic and commercial: he increases Bob Cratchit’s wages, pays a boy to purchase the butcher’s prize turkey, and employs a cab driver to transport it to Cratchit’s house.

Lee Erickson, a critic, has compared the book’s conclusion to John Maynard Keynes’s view of the economic importance of “spontaneous optimism, rather than mathematical expectation”. Rather than Marxist revolution or Victorian beneficence, “A Christmas Carol” prescribes free trade and buzzing commerce. Fitting, then, that it should share its 175th birthday with this newspaper.